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Ask HN: What's the best computer science book you've read recently?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the best computer science book you've read recently?

#112
The source code and commentary of xv6, a simple Unix-like teaching operating system. By far the best book on operating systems I have encountered so far.

https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2012/xv6.html

(The alternative is learning PDP-11 assembler and reading the original Unix v6 sources with Lion's commentary.)

Re: Ask HN: What's the best computer science book you've read recently?

#114
Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppman. He does a great job of distilling storage systems to concepts and discussing conceptual trade offs instead of focusing on particular storage products. Plenty of footnotes to relevant research papers too.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best computer science book you've read recently?

#115
C# in depth by John Skeet. This could easily be one of the best computer related books i've ever read. The amazing thing is that is shows with code examples how the language progressed from one version to the next. I've never read anything similar in computer literature. It gave me a deep understanding of the language and all its caveats.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best computer science book you've read recently?

#116
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The book is basically a scam and panned. He talks about automata like it was new and he invented it. I strongly suggest you read the Amazon reviews.

On the plus side it is full of pretty pictures, has a massive number of pages which can be used to press leaves or flowers, heat in the winter and a door stop in the summer to encourage airflow. There really isn't a bad quality about this book. Oh, and super cheap on the used market.

Got mine for about 10 USD. page/price ratio is quite impressive.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best computer science book you've read recently?

#117
Quantum Computing Since Democritus by Scott Aaronson.

A brilliant MIT professor's reflections on the intersection between computer science, physics and philosophy.

Here are the lecture notes and book: http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/

I also very much recommend the author's blog: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/

Re: Ask HN: What's the best computer science book you've read recently?

#118
I read Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming by Jeffrey Richter a few years ago and felt that that's how technical books shold be written. I felt happy every time I got to read it.

https://www.amazon.com/Microsoft%C2%AE-Framework-Programming...

Re: Ask HN: What's the best computer science book you've read recently?

#120
post #29

More about programming than computer science, but it does talk a lot about and show some custom algorithms (it's more about programming-in-the-small, though it does talk about some big picture too), also it is old and out of print (last I checked), but I thought it was really good when I bought and read it, so mentioning it: Writing Efficient Programs Also has a great bunch of "war stories" about performance tuning i…

When I started coding for a living in the early 1990s (in an environment where efficiency was paramount), Writing Efficient Programs was gold. I still have it, and I'm glad that to see that it's still valued.
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